DrupalCon Europe 2020

This 2020 DrupalCon was planned to be held in the beautiful Barcelona. We all know what happened and DrupalCon went remote, in a new experience really challenging. The conference used an online platform that was very interesting. Apart from the obvious sessions, it had several other functionalities that resembled a real conference. For example, there was a hall function: when you entered there you were paired with a group of 5 to 10 persons from the people in the hall for a video conference of just 5 minutes. Once time ended, the system stops the video conference and creates new random groups with the people still in the hall. In some way, is like the chatting groups in the corridors in a real conference. Neat!

There were, as always, very good talks and good vibes. Sadly, I could not attend many of them: remote is great because it is easy to join, but is bad because it is also easy that some urgent task prevents you to join a session. So I prefer not to highlight any session because I feel it would be unfair given I missed a lot of them.

Metadrop was there not only as attendees but also as speakers. We were very glad to have the opportunity to be part of this event and try to give something back to the Community.

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The experience was quite weird: talking during 40 minutes to your own screen and a webcam without any feedback from attendees is very hard because that lack of information from the people you want to understand and get your message. However, I think both attendees and speakers got used to it and the experience was successful.

My colleague, Jorge Tutor, talked about "Self-Management in remote environments", a great topic in these times.

You can find the slides here.

One good thing about the conference platform was the after-session feedback: all attendees were able to answer some questions about the session they had just watch. You can see how many people were attending, session rate and quality of the materials, presentation skills and knowledge. But the most important feedback was two text fields were people could write more meaningful messages. I really value this kind of information as a speaker because you should talk to your audience, and what they think is very important to improve the session. At the end what a speaker wants is to communicate as clearly and easily as they can.

The platform then shared the results, here are the ones for Tutor's session:

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The second session, "Reactive Programming: Dealing with Asynchronicity", had me as a speaker.  I must confess it is not the first time I talk about Reactive Programming. This talk was also at Drupal Moutan Camp, Davos, and at Decoupled Drupal Days, New York. I hope previous experiences allowed me to improve the session:

And the survey results:

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Someone asks for more examples: sadly I removed some because of the time constraint. One removed example was this: a button smasher code (detects clicks in a row in a certain time span, do you remember the ZX Spectrum Daley Thompson's Decathlon game?).

You can find more live examples of Observables at the Rx Visualizer site. I find the "Mouse move" example very helpful to understand Observables: it outputs an Observable emitting the X position of the mouse when it moves. You can even write and run your own example!

I removed some other examples but you can find them on the previous version of this talk at Drupal Mountain Camp.

And last, I love the one who answers always "yes" on the survey. I bet we had an informative bit there.